End

“ The end comes as came the beginning, And shadows fail into the past; And the goal, is it not worth the winning, If it brings us but home at the last? While over the pain of waste places We tread, ‘tis a blossoming rod That drives us to grace from disgraces, From the plains to the Gardens of God. ”

“ THE END OF THINGS
The aim of the heavens, the end of the earth—
What a measureless sweep, what a mighty girth,
From the far off first to the end of all things!
The end of the rose, which fades in a day,
The purpose of the plant an age on the way—
I dream of Beauty in the end of things.
The end of all men, and the end of myself,
From the artist great to the smallest elf,
Our thoughts and our deeds in the end of things.
The fate of the infants who die without ken,
Of their growth and knowledge, God’s super-men—
What developments vast in the end of things! ”

“ Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. ”

“ The commencement of a thing is immediately connected, in idea if not in time, with its end. “Lightly come, lightly go.” The will has called it into existence—the will calls it back again into nothing. ”

“ With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! ”

“ Enter Quince for the Prologue.
Prologue.
If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end. ”

“ The true story has no end—no end. But endlessly dreary would the story be, were there no Life living by its own will, no perfect Will, one with an almighty heart, no Love in whom we live and move and have our being. ”

“ Masters, I have to tell a tale of woe, A tale of folly and of wasted life, Hope against hope, the bitter dregs of strife, Ending, where all things end, in death at last: ”

“ What end does either serve, but to pass and be forgotten. What is left for us but the bald consolation of imaging a form for the Supreme Power—one like ourselves by preference—and a concession to it.... ”

“ If these words could be taken in any general sense, then we might say to every present generation, The end of all things is at hand; the end of all the good which the wicked enjoy, and the end of all the evil which the righteous suffer. ”

“ The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end. ”

“ Why have not I the courage, then, to endure this time of trial they call ‘life,’ which I have wished to consider the end, but which is only a road leading to the end—a road perilous, rough, and wearing? The shortest is the one I consider the best; and he who travels over it most rapidly, has he not found true happiness? ”

“ Nature, and even the passions and vices of men, have from the beginning tended towards this end; a great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that this end, which is the condition of all farther social progress, will in time be attained. ”

“ Now, what, then, is that world which is to exist absolutely, and which, therefore, is the absolute expression of the final end, and after the realization of which the final end will have been altogether achieved and made visible? Evidently that world which exists for its own sake, and not for the sake of another world. ”

“ And that must end us; that must be our cure— To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Devoid of sense and motion? ”

“ Not to the curious or impatient soul
That in the start, demands the end be shown,
And at each step, stops waiting for a sign;
But to the tireless toiler toward the goal,
Shall the great miracles of God be known
And life revealed, immortal and divine. ”

“ This term for ends in general is as old as the days of Anaxagoras. Let us now attend to these two conceptions, intelligence or thought considered as the beginning, and the good considered as the end. And let us suppose an illustrative case drawn from human nature: it may, perhaps, assist us in forming some imperfect conception of the divine intelligence and its ends. Let us suppose that a savage has the thought of some good, or some end. Now he must think of this as a particular good or particular end; no man can think of good in general or end in general. ”

“ In fiction you settle upon the final chapter before you begin the first, and every event is described and placed in the fabric of the story to suit an end already in view. A story of real life, like real life itself, has no beginning, no end. ”

“ Consistently with this we have the conclusion stated in the succeeding section on the Will. “Good, the final end of the world, has being only while it constantly produces itself. And the world of the spirit and the world of nature continue to have this distinction, that the latter moves only in a recurring cycle while the former certainly also makes progress.” ”

“ “The most perfect life develops as a circle, and terminates in its beginning, making it impossible to say, This is the commencement, that the end. ”

“ The end in both cases, however, is a helpless breaking-down in the face of the constantly approaching Unknown, or the banishment of all thoughts on the subject as far as possible, or finally, in the bravest cases, a stoical surrender to an unavoidable fate—unless there is a hope that life will continue beyond. ”

“ It was a time, he considered, when the processes or means by which life is lived constituted the end of life itself, without seeking for some other end external to them and often incompatible with them. ”

“ "Everything is all one—that is the beginning and end with you. ”

“ That life is long, which answers life’s great end. ”

“ The question of our text implies, as we have already suggested, that our whole lives, with all their various and often opposite experiences, are yet an ordered whole, having a definite end. There is some purpose beyond the moment to be served. ”

“ Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?" ”

“ That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby, appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. Read alternately in natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy, for example, with a volume of French Memoires pour servir. ”

“ As though the veil between were leaking?
What means it now, as evening lowers?
The breath of Heaven? The scent of flowers?
Or—what one's faith has long been seeking?
All things in life must have an ending ”

“ The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. ”

“ That is the true beginning of our end. ”

“ Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over. ”

“ And when through failure of sense or spirit the vision is obscured, the soul becomes conscious in itself of that to which mountain and ocean are but servants,—the reserve power to endure and to conquer which springs to life at the stern challenge. ”

“ 'No need to listen for the fall. This is the world's end,' he said, and swung off. ”

“ Therefore ye do but right to seek to the Well at the World's End, that ye may the better accomplish that which behoveth you, and that ye may serve your fellows and deliver them from the thralldom of those that be strong and unwise and unkind, of whom we have heard strange tales. ”

“ “Then you are quite behind the age,” said the Water-rat. “Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle. ”

“ Now I will not seek to see thy life that is coming, nor what thine end shall be, for that should belike be grievous to both of us; but this I see of thee, that thou wilt now guide thy life not as I will, but as thou wilt; and since my way is not thy way, and that I see thou shalt not long abide alone, now shall we sunder; for I am minded to go to the most ancient parts of the world, and seek all the innermost of wisdom whiles I yet live; but with kings and champions and the cities of folk will I have no more to do: while thou shalt not be able to refrain from these. ”

“ To listen to it, to obey it honestly and unreservedly, without fear or equivocation,—this is my true vocation, the whole end and purpose of my existence. My life ceases to be an empty play without truth or significance. ”

“ But, for such an experience, this constitution of the finite is a fact determined from an absolute point of view, and every finite incompleteness and struggle appears as a part of a whole in whose wholeness the fragments find their true place, the ideas their realisation, the seeking its fulfilment, and our whole life its truth, and so its eternal rest, — that peace which transcends the storms of its agony and its restlessness. ”

“ Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? ”

“ Looking out over eternity, that billowy expanse, do we not see rising, clear though shadowy, a vast Permanence, Completion, Realization, in which the soul of man shall have endless progress and delight? ”

“ The End of Means is art that works by love.
The End of Ends ... in God’s Beginning’s lost.”
This work was published before January 1, 1928, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. ”

“ How noble, how sacred, how wonderful is life! A few years, comparably brief as moments, on the mortal plane of existence, to be followed by an endless Eternity, spent in gleaning wisdom and happiness from the rich fields of infinite progression. ”

“ Further, as means are proportioned to their end; and as the last end of man exceeds any corporeal thing; the operations of the understanding and of the will, by means of which man attains his end, transcend all bodies ”

“ Then he added, reflectively, "everything has to come to an end, some time." ”

“ How many souls now writhing in eternal torments could, on ascending the course of their lives, point out the solemn moment in which they made a choice of a state of life as the time of their departure from the road to heaven. ”

“ An end, on the other hand, is that which from its nature is after something else, either necessarily, or usually, but after which there is nothing, A middle, what is itself after some other thing, and after which also there is something. ”